Is Satya Nadella being paid too much? Seventy-two percent of Microsoft’s shareholders don’t think so. The company CEO’s $84 million a year pay package was approved yesterday after it was first scrutinized by ISS, an investor advisory group, who came to the conclusion that the man seemingly pushing Microsoft towards a merrier future was being paid too much. Nadella’s actual base salary is $918,917, although he is awarded a $3.6 million bonus and has stock grants worth $79.8 million – $59 million on his promotion to CEO, $13.5 million as a retention payment and $7 million for his performance.

The ISS group, which uses a proxy voting system to maintain cordial interaction between shareholders and companies, said that if the vote was less than 70 percent, then Microsoft would have been put in a position to make a change to the CEO’s pay grade. However, the vote was not an all-out show of support for Nadella and his predictably large salary; the average level of support in cases of salaries for company executives when put to the vote is reportedly 91.5 percent, according to ISS ExecComp Analytics.

The pay package puts Nadella firmly in the top ten of the highest paid CEOs in the tech industry, trailing Tim Cook of Apple Inc. who earned $378 million in his first year. Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder, is also at the top of the earners list, having reportedly been paid $78.4 million in 2013.  Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, earned far less than Nadella, with a pay package of just $1.3 million, although it’s said that his shares were worth close to $16 billion.  Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, take home a solitary buck in wages, although their earnings are unsurprisingly astronomical.

Likely due in part to Nadella’s apparent insensitivity to women employed at Microsoft not being paid fair wages, much of the discussion at the meeting was about diversity and civil rights. Jesse Jackson, a civil rights leader, insisted that the tech industry should focus on hiring and promoting more minorities and female staff. Nadella came under heavy criticism when addressing pay-inequality at Microsoft earlier this year when he seemed to tell underpaid women that they should rely on karma, or trust in the system, to straighten out pay inequality. Nadella did later apologize for his words, saying he had been “inarticulate” in expressing his views.  The highest paid woman in the world of tech is Safra Catz, CFO and president of Oracle with total compensation of $44.3 million; Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, made $24.9 in 2013; Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman makes more than Mayer, but like Zuckerberg and the Google co-founders, she is on a $1 salary.

The 72 percent vote should not be taken as an out and out criticism, said Wall Street analysts, who in an interview with ABC News expressed that it’s widely believed that Nadella is making Microsoft a much more profitable company. Microsoft’s stocks have seen an increase of 30 percent since Nadella became the leading man at the company. Colin Gillis of BGC Financial noted in the report, “I think that’s the primary metric most people care about. If you think about the billions in value that’s been created, this is a tiny fraction of that.”

In a letter to shareholders in November this year, John Thompson, the Chairman of Microsoft, said that the company wanted to “attract and motivate a world-class CEO”, and that the princely package is key in this motivation as much of it is based on performance; Microsoft also of course wants to keep the so far winning captain on their side. Nadella’s earnings will drop if the company’s stock goes into downfall, but at the moment it is looking like Nadella’s pay package is going to stay in good shape.

Photo credit: Mark J P via photopin cc